BALTIMORE—Drew French is in his third season as the Orioles’ pitching coach. On Sunday, he spoke with the local media. Here are excerpts:
Question: How does this year’s Orioles’ rotation compare with others?
Drew French: “Depth-wise, I don’t know that we’ve been in a position to have six, seven, eight, nine, maybe even 10 guys that we have a ton of belief in and confidence in that they’re going to pitch innings for us this year. This is a playoff-caliber team with talent and the skill level that we have. It’s a really, really good problem to have. How do you fit these pieces of the puzzle together to make this whole thing work for 162 games?
“It’s a good issue to have. Now to try to keep everyone consistent and healthy for 162 games, that’s another deal in and of itself.”
Q: What is it about Shane Baz that makes the team convinced he has a great upside?
French: “He’s got the aptitude of a veteran, an older guy. I think coming up in Pittsburgh for a little bit, getting to Tampa where he spoke about spending time with [Zach] Eflin and [Andrew] Kittredge, the guys he grew up around, he’s started to think about the right things much earlier in his career than a lot of guys do where you can get a little more granular and a little more technical about your game.
“You still have to think about the right things and believe in the right things that help you win games, and they have to scale.”
Q: How will you monitor Kyle Bradish’s workload this year?
French: “The big leagues is the octagon. You always have one eye on it. There’s tangible things, objective things that you’re monitoring, you’re looking at.
“But you’re also talking to the player. You’re also talking to the people around the player that are hearing from him in the training room, the weight room, the things that are showing up there. I think collectively we’re just going to try to do the best job that we can for him and, obviously, as we spoke about the depth earlier, if we need to spell him at times, if we need to go to a six-man [rotation] at times, Chris Bassitt has been well known for jumping in front of guys to help for an extra day.
“We have a lot of insurance policies both in his clubhouse and the organization.”
Q: How tough was it to send Dean Kremer to the minor leagues?
French: “One of the most difficult things I’ve been a part of. It was emotional for a lot of people … You’re trying to make the best decision for the overall organization, your overall team. As much as it hurts, as much as we miss and we love Dean, we know that he’s going to be putting one foot in front of the other, and when the time is right, he’s going to be impactful for this team to get where we want to go.”
Q: What makes you think Trevor Rogers can be a front-line starter for an entire season?
French: “Eighteen starts and what he did. I think the sample size is pretty big enough to know that it works against all different kinds of offenses, against the guys who are disciplined, against flatter bat guys, against deeper bat-angle guys. It worked.
“He’s got stuff inside of his arsenal that when you look at inside of a vacuum, you don’t realize how unique this guy is.
“The guy commands the fastball at a pretty elite clip. When you start there, that’s the first box that you need to check, and as long as that continues to run the rock for him, we feel like the other stuff’s going to fall in line, but we’re really proud of the consistency of the breaking balls and the work that he put in this offseason.”
Q: How impressive was Anthony Nunez’s debut on Saturday?
French: “When you look at a guy who’s drafted as a position player and somebody who’s had to throw the ball across the diamond from a really far distance to a first baseman and be accurate doing that, we feel like the strike-throwing and the command is going to be something that’s pretty much going to be automatic for him.
“Getting comfortable, it didn’t seem like he had any issues doing that. He’s got real weapons. He’s got angles that are very, very unique. This is a guy that we can foresee walking his way up into more leverage, for sure.”
Q: Is Tyler Wells’ future in the bullpen or does he have a chance to start in a six-man rotation?
French: “I think if we got to that point, maybe. After you get down the path of not throwing multiple innings and not having 50 or more pitches, you kind of retrain a guy to do that job. We see him as a really important piece of the back end of our bullpen right now.
“I think with what we have in Triple-A, the group that we have here that’s so far, so good, is healthy, we believe he’s probably more fit for that role right now.”
Q: You had four pitching prospects — Trey Gibson, Nestor German, Levi Wells and Luis De Léon — stay with the team for nearly all of major league camp. How close to playing for the Orioles are they?
French: “I don’t think we would know until they are here doing it. Because of what the day in the life of a major league starter looks like on game day, and the four and five days in between is really the definition of who these guys are going to be.
“Each of them have two to three things that I feel like they do really, really well. Being in camp a long time gave us an opportunity to know them and see how they go about their work. We valued them being around our major league coaching staff and our trainers and our strength coaches.
“How close are they? I think they’re really, really close, but I think the margin’s really, really thin and really, really small. I don’t think we’ll really know until they get here, but they’ve been raised the right way and they’ve been brought up the right way. We want them to believe in the right things and think about the right things at the right time, and that’s probably the hardest thing to do in this sport right now as a pitcher.”
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